An infrastructure for collective agency — a common grammar for plural, sovereign coordination across scales and scopes.
The project develops Agent Commons: a pattern language, protocol family, and governance-memory layer for coordination and coherence without surrendering sovereignty. Here "agent" means any entity with enough coherence to perceive, decide, and act — a person, an AI, a team, an organization, a federation, a mixed human-AI collective.
Spore is the project. Agent Commons is the protocol family it publishes.
Why "Spore"? A spore is portable, generative, and context-sensitive: it moves through larger living networks, lands in a place, and unfolds locally. Spore follows the same logic — a shared coordination grammar that can land across projects, grow in different forms, and remain interoperable without requiring centralization.
At a high level, Spore thinks in fields, networks, membranes, and gardens. The field is the wider relational medium of coordination and learning; networks describe its topology; membranes govern boundary crossings; gardens are cultivated regions within that field where knowledge is actively tended.
As the number of agents, scales, and overlapping memberships grows, coherence degrades. Intentions become invisible. Dependencies become implicit. Memory fragments across tools, teams, and time. The usual responses are well-documented: compress variety through centralized control (legible but brittle), or let structure dissolve into informal networks (flexible but incoherent). Both are failure modes. The third path — adaptive coordination through shared grammar, explicit memory, and iterative sensing — is what Spore works toward.
Coordination is an ecology of ongoing, overlapping activities:
- Vision orients — direction, values, constraints
- Intents signal — offers, needs, conditions, where plurality enters
- Commitments bind — accepted, scope-bound, governed
- Evidence grounds — observations, attestations, fulfillment
- Learning revises — updating roadmaps, refining patterns, adapting vision
These activities feed each other in every direction. Learning revises visions. Evidence generates new intents. Commitments reveal visions that weren't visible before. Not all intents become commitments — the space between intention and binding is where plurality lives. The same ecology operates at every scale: a single person exercises agency through this cycle; coordination enters when multiple agents' ecologies overlap and need to interoperate.
Constitutional commitments — provenance, forkability, pluralism, meaningful autonomy, authorized boundary crossing, reviewable authority, contestability. These are chosen design commitments, not eternal truths. Together they define the conditions of relational freedom: the structural ground that makes coordination possible without requiring convergence.
Containment and overlap — the holonic axis organizes nested integrity; the network axis organizes cross-cutting participation and lateral reach. The result is a semilattice, not a tree. Living systems cannot be captured by a single clean hierarchy, and neither can the coordination structures that serve them.
Self-similarity — the same artifact ecology recurs at every scale, from personal workflow to planetary federation. Every constitutional artifact exists as text (for humans) and graph projection (for machines), so the grammar remains legible at both speeds. These projections are locally queryable representations that can be selectively federated, rather than one continuously live global graph.
The full argument lives in project-vision.md.
- Project Vision — what Spore is, why it exists, what it is for
- Coordination Grammar — working synthesis of the grammar's primitives and patterns
- Documentation Map — full map of foundations, patterns, protocols, and governance docs
- Roadmap — where the project is headed
Spore learns from the wider coordination ecosystem through a learning membrane — a comparative intake process that ingests external frameworks, translates them into bridge notes, comparative notes, and claims as appropriate, and selectively promotes what proves useful into canon. The membrane exercises the same boundary-crossing operations that govern all exchange in the grammar. Bridge notes are source-specific; comparative notes record multi-tradition support for enacted canon/foundation language. These research connections live in docs/research/connections/.
In this vocabulary, the learning membrane tends a knowledge garden within the wider learning field. The canonical definition of field lives in docs/foundations/lexicon/field.md.
You do not migrate into Spore as a platform. You let your project speak more of the grammar by adding coordination surfaces — legible intent, shared memory, commitment protocols — at whatever pace makes sense. A project can use one pattern without adopting the full stack. Adoption is incremental and reversible. Spore is designed for coexistence with existing systems, not total rupture.
For concrete steps, see the adoption guide.
Spore defines a grammar and publishes patterns and protocols. Others adopt and implement them. A Spore instance is any project that implements some composition of the grammar's patterns.
- koi-processor — node substrate: knowledge graph, entity resolution, federation, sensors
- BKC / Octo — operational instance family: BKC canon + 4 federated nodes + Octo agent + Quartz sites
Early stage. Working implementations at small scale across 4 projects. The pattern language and conventions are evolving.
Peer Production License (PPL) — a copyfair license derived from CC BY-NC-SA 3.0. Free for non-commercial use, cooperatives, and worker-owned collectives. See LICENSE.